Xu Xiake Travelogue by Xu Xiake
3 min readXu Xiake(1587-1641), also known as Xu Hongzu by his courtesy name, was born in Jiangyin of Jiangsu province.
From childhood, he was interested in fantastic books and kept inquiring curiously about the “wonders of famous mountains and rivers”. From the age of 20, he started his travels · Xu Xiake and went on traveling over a period of 30 years despite rain or snow, long distance, hardship and danger, and loneliness on the way; he climbed up steep cliffs, visited far and remote areas, and never gave up in spite of his frequent encounter of thieves and robbers along the way, lack of adequate food and money, and sickness. He was the first traveler who made investigational travel a career for his whole life in China, and his footprints covered many provinces including present-day Shandong, Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Fujian, Guangdong, Hunan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan, Tianjin, Beijing, and Shanghai. Taking the year of 1636 as the boundary, prior to that year, he mainly toured the places of wonders and interests, during which he wrote 17 travelogues including The Tiantai Mountain, The Yellow Mountain and The Yandang Mountain; after that year, most of his steps covered southwest China, with the focus on exploration of the developmental law of karst landform, based on which he kept diaries on the way, including Diaries of Travel in West Guangdong Province, Diary of Travel in Guizhou Province, and Diary of Travel in Yunnan Province. Despite any difficulty he was confronted with, he would persist in keeping diaries which were hard-won first-hand records, but it’s a pity that many of those diaries were lost because he had not compiled them into a book. It was not until 1642 that his friend Ji Mengliang sorted out all his travelogues and diaries and wrote them up as a book.
Xu Xiake’s Travelogue handed down today contains 600,000 Chinese characters involving geology, landforms, climate, hydrology, biology, human geography, ethnology, folkways, and so forth, of which the greatest proportion and accomplishment lie in landforms, hydrology and biology.
In the book the landforms alone encompass karst, hilly area, Danxia (reddish sandstone formation), fluvial, volcano, periglacial, etc., of which his most prominent coverage is the karst landform. He himself explored the karst landform from Feilai Peak (Peak Flying from Afar) near Hangzhou in the east to Baoshan prefecture of west Yunnan province, China. His findings show that alone some vast karst landforms located in south Hunan and east Yunnan cover an area of 550,000 km2, much larger than the Dinaric karst in Crotia and the South Appalachian karst in U.S., the ones in the two provinces of China being more typical with higher diversity. He explored more than 270 caves by himself, recorded the direction, height, width, depth and formational causes, and correctly indicated that the cave formation is attributable to the mechanical erosion of water, and the stalactites to gradual agglomeration through evaporation of the calcium containing water. Thedepth and scope of his account about karst landform was record-breaking both in China and around the world. His investigation into karst landforms in tropical zones was 200 years earlier than that by the German traveler Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn and his findings about caves was half century earlier than that by the Slovenian explorer Janez Vajkard Valvasor. Xu Xiake’s Travelogue remains the firstscientific work on extensive and systematical recordings and exploration of karst landforms in the world as well as the travelogue of the most literary value in the history of Chinese literature, honored as an example of “real, great and peculiar writing in the world”among the people.
